Due to the ever-changing nature of a restaurant’s workforce, keeping an up-to-date contact list of employees with their most recent phone numbers and e-mails is often a difficult task.

But Ringya, a free iPhone application, is addressing the problem head-on by providing a collaborative contact-list system.

Ringya[6], which released last year, is an app that converts contact lists into easy-to-access “Rings,” or mobile digital contact lists. The user uploads a document file (such as a Word document or PDF) or a picture of a paper contact list through Ringya, and the specific Ring is created and sent back to the user without the user having to manually enter each contact separately. The Ring can then be shared with the entire staff. Any changes made to the list by anyone in the group will update for all members of that Ring.

“There are two things that are very unique about us,” says Gal Nachum, cofounder and CEO of Ringya. “The first is the ability to create those contact lists or those Rings very, very easily. There’s no other application where you can just basically snap a picture and that’s it.

“The second thing … is the collaborative aspect,” Nachum adds. “The fact that anyone can update the list makes it so much easier. Anyone can make that update, and that’s it, it’s done for everyone. So those self-updating capabilities are so convenient for these types of ever-changing teams.”

Nachum says Ringya is specifically useful for quick-service operators and employees because of its group-messaging capabilities. Since each Ring includes a person’s name and contact information, as well as his or her title or role, group messages can be sent to the whole group or just to certain members with the same title.

Though Ringya is exclusive to iPhone users, Nachum says the Android version should be ready to download in February.

“We’ve been out there for a few months now getting very, very positive response from everyone who started using it. I’m really excited about it,” Nachum says.

Nachum says group messaging and ability to add pictures for each contact are features he hopes to add soon.

“We plan to introduce more advanced group messaging, more ways, basically, for the group to share resources, to share pictures, to share reach media, to really make use of the fact that now [that] we have a group, let’s do something with it,” he says.